


Always & Forever

by reginaldthegreat



Category: Hooky (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Lime, Passion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:55:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29084253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reginaldthegreat/pseuds/reginaldthegreat
Summary: “He is about to pull away quickly, to recover smoothly from ‘the moment’ as he usually does, as they both do, but something about the way she looks at him makes him stay.“
Relationships: Aisha/Mark Evans (Hooky), Maisha (Hooky), Mark Evans/Aisha (Hooky)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	Always & Forever

It is a rather quiet day in the kingdom, event-wise. Monica and Will are busy with their royal duties, Damien at work as Will’s butler, Dorian teaching, no less, and Dani and Nico... well, who knows where they were? Traveling the world in search of new adventures, no less. Everyone had wrapped up their stories, it seemed like. Everyone had fallen in love, had the careers they dreamed of.

Aisha usually felt happy for them. She felt very discomforted by any feelings of jealousy that bubbled up within her, quickly shoving them deep down where she’d undoubtedly forget about it moments later. 

However, today, when she saw Mark bustling around his father’s café with a tray of baked goods, flour smudged on his cheek and the smell of bread and vanilla wafting off his apron, she suddenly felt a wave of frustration. 

Compared to the palace back home, complete with its luxury and leisure and countless handsome suitors, she couldn’t help but feel like _this_ was the life she wanted. 

She wanted the chaos of the small café, the noise, to put effort into _creating_ something and perhaps also... maybe...

She glanced at the tall, dark-haired man who looked up from his small notepad, meeting her eyes with a wink. He turned back to the table of which he was taking the order and Aisha shook the thought away. 

Sometimes, she wondered if Mark liked her, and sometimes, she wondered if she liked him. 

The fatal flaw that Mark and Aisha shared was that they assumed they were much too busy to ponder on dreams and consider all the things that _could_ be. There was only what _was_. 

And what _was_ was that sometimes, there would be moments where he would look at her for just a second too long, or she would smile at him in _that_ kind of way, and they’d both wonder. For that instance, maybe everything they wanted was so close they could reach out and touch it. 

But then the moment would pass and time would move at a steady pace yet again. 

Like now. 

“Aisha,” Mark called, his sea green eyes glinting playfully as he strode up to her, having just taken a couple more orders. “You’re looking awfully contemplative. Everything alright?”

“Yep,” she said, waving a hand in dismissal. “May I help you with those orders?”

“You may indeed.”

They returned to the kitchen, darting from one end to the other, moving like two pucks in a pin-ball arcade game. 

Even though it was Mark’s restaurant, Aisha spent so much time there that she knew it just as well as he did, even better at times. 

“I can’t believe how much the establishment has improved in the past year,” he said cheerfully, sifting flour into a bowl of sugar. 

Aisha squeezed past him as she grabbed an egg from the refrigerator, placing it into his already outstretched hand. This was simply muscle memory at this point. 

“I don’t think the food is the only thing that keeps people coming back,” she huffed in response. He looked up at her, an eyebrow raised in question. 

She rolled her eyes at his oblivion. Outside the café were several tables full of young women, all who stopped by for tea and scones with a side of Mark. 

Every time he stepped outside, ducking his head under the striped umbrellas that shielded the customers from the glaring sun, Aisha heard muffled giggles. She wondered how it was possible for her to be the only one noticing these sly glances at her handsome companion. 

Mark shook his head in confusion. “What else, if not the food?”

 _You_ , Aisha would’ve said, had she not heard the sound of the word play in her head and trigger a wave of embarrassment at the intimacy of the response. 

“The place is cute,” she replied. “Mr. Evans did a great job when he designed this place.” 

“Yeah, dad does have good taste,” he agreed. 

Their voices died down, melting into a few minutes of comfortable silence, before Mark nonchalantly requested something from the walk-in freezer. 

“What do you need?” Aisha asked, already making her way into the back. 

“Just the mango ice cream on the top shelf,” he called, “for a smoothie.”

Mango hadn’t been a flavor in the menu until Aisha became a permanent addition to the café’s system. She was never formally inducted as an employee but she was practically a co-owner at this point. Between the two of them, Mark’s father didn’t even have to come to work most days. 

When she started working with him, she suggested a whole new assortment of flavors, including mango, lychee, and pomegranate. Mark was always ecstatic at her ideas. 

They made a good team. 

“Mark,” Aisha called, her voice muffled behind the wall. “I can’t reach it. I told you not to put stuff you use a lot on the top shelf where I can’t reach.”

“Ah yes, I always underestimate just how short you are,” he laughed. She let out a groan in response.

He pushed his way into the narrow cooler, ducking down a little from the low door frame. 

Aisha was on her tiptoes, straining with her whole body to simply graze her fingertips with the ice cream carton. 

Her dark, tousled hair was messy from her bedhead, which Mark couldn’t deny was very cute. Small, fiesty girl. Messy hair. Like a little kitten. 

He caught his wandering thoughts halfway, a slight blush dusting his pale cheeks. He urged himself to focus on the matter at hand and the many orders that he had yet to take care of. 

“Here, let me get that,” he said, hand leaving to door handle as he stepped closer. 

“Wait, no, Mark, the door!” Aisha cried, darting under his outstretched arm to try and grab it before it slammed shut, to no avail. The remaining slice of light was cut out as the heavy door clicked into place, submerging both of them in pitch black, cold darkness.

“Oh no.”

A classic case of a one way door. And it was absolutely freezing in here. 

It didn’t snow where Aisha grew up. 

“Well, it was nice knowing you. I’m going to sit in this corner and wait for the hypothermia to steal my last breath from me,” she announced, and Mark felt her smaller body brush against his own as she squeezed past him, then realized there wasn’t enough space to sit with both of them in there.

He chuckled. “It’s okay, I have my phone on me. It’s got a little battery left in it. I’ll just call my dad to come get us out.”

He’d only be 20 minutes, they both knew. Mr. Evans was quick to answer phone calls and was only a short distance from the café. 

When Mark clicked the phone on, the white light pierced the darkness, casting a glow on both their faces. 

They both were suddenly aware of just how close they were standing together, but tried to pretend like they were oblivious.

He dialed his father’s number and put the call on speaker, the sound of the ringing loud in the closed space. It only rang twice before, as expected, he picked up. 

“Hello?” he asked, his voice low and rumbling. 

“Hi dad. Sorry to bother you, but would you be able to stop at the café for a moment? Aisha and I-“

“Oh! Aisha!” his father interrupted. “Tell her I said hello!”

“Hi Mr. Evans,” Aisha said, smiling as she looked up to meet Mark’s eyes and identical smile. 

“Oh, how are you, my dear?” he asked, a jolly tint to his voice. 

“Trapped in the cooler with your son,” she laughed, “how are you?”

“Goodness! Hold on, I’ll be right there!”

Mark chuckled at the ‘click’ of his father hanging up the call. 

“He always shouts on phone calls,” he said, though he sounded more good humored than annoyed. 

“It’s okay, his excitement is contagious,” Aisha said. 

Their conversations settled into silence, but this silence wasn’t comfortable like all their other silences. There wasn’t any dough to fold, orders to take, decisions to fret over, to replace the words that could’ve been said. 

“I’m trying not to worry about the customers,” Mark attempted to fill the silence. 

“It’s okay, no use worrying over something we can’t control,” Aisha replied. 

Silence again. 

Mark continuously tapped the screen of his phone to keep the light on, but now he was hoping for his phone to die already so he would have an excuse for not having to deal with the tension of not knowing _where to look_. 

Aisha’s body was so close to his, and she too was having a similar predicament. She looked into the darkness between the shelves on her right, then her left, then the darkness at their feet, then again, briefly, at the only other illuminated surface in the cooler, Mark’s face. 

He frowned when he noticed her tremble, the cold seeping into her petite frame. 

“Hey, are you okay?” he asked, his voice soft. 

She peered up at him from under her dark eyelashes, her big eyes shining. He feels a pang in his chest he does his best to muffle at the sight. 

“I’m okay,” she said, then pouted thoughtfully. “You know, my science tutor once taught me that hot air rises. I wonder if it’s warmer up there?”

He chuckles and crouches down a little to see if it was indeed colder a full foot and four inches below his head. Except now, his face is in awfully close proximity to hers. 

He is about to pull away quickly, to recover smoothly from “the moment” as he usually does, as they both do, but something about the way she looks at him makes him stay.

Their eyes are locked, his teal irises fixated on her onyx ones. 

“You’re right, it’s a little warmer down here,” he says, but he says this because their faces are suddenly very, very warm. Maybe it wasn’t as cold as they thought. Aisha certainly wasn’t shivering anymore. 

Mark realizes all at once that her eyes are big and beautiful and no one’s eyes have ever captivated him like that. His gaze follows the curve of her jawline, soft, smooth, polarizing compared to the sharper edges of his own face. 

Has she always been this... stunning? 

Aisha was thinking along the same lines.

 _He has nice skin,_ she thought, and didn’t even cringe at the depths of her desires. How could she be embarrassed when his face was inches apart from hers, seemingly drawing closer by the minute. Or maybe second? Time is a social construct. 

They could feel their breath on each other, the restraints that had kept them apart for so long slipping as their minds lost traction. Suddenly, neither of them could remember why they had been _just_ friends this whole time. 

They both felt a foreign ache throughout their body, the ache that begs to be felt and to feel. 

In the midst of it all, Mark forgets to tap the screen on his phone and keep the light on and it goes out, submerging them in darkness once more. 

That appeared to be the silent cue, because the moment the light is out, his lips are on hers, her hands in his hair. 

So long. It had been so long. 

He leaned down into her and she stood on her tiptoes, his hand on the small of her back and her little hands pulling him closer. Close wasn’t close enough. 

The small closet heightened the sounds they were making, the moans amid their kisses ricocheting off the walls as they pressed into each other. 

Despite Mark’s bigger size, Aisha pushed him back against the cooler door, the cold surface making him gasp into her mouth. He didn’t get a chance to think about it because her tongue was slipping down his throat and truthfully, he didn’t care about the cold anymore anyway. 

It felt like his whole body was on fire. 

He wanted more. Wanted all of her. Now. Later. Always. Forever. 

“Mark,” Aisha said softly, almost a whimper, against his lips, and his stomach twisted at the sound. She wasn’t one to whimper and the sound, so foreign on her tongue, turned his mind into pudding. 

Her hands were at his stomach, over his shirt, but she kept bringing them low as if he wanted to touch him under it but was pulling away at the last second out of caution. 

“Touch me,” he urged, no, pleaded, his black hair falling out of the style he’d combed it into this morning. 

She didn’t respond, merely slipping her hands under the hem of his shirt. Where was his apron? He didn’t remember taking it off but it was on the floor-

The thought was torn away when her hands traveled up his bare skin, her nails softly scraping across his back. He grabbed her face, angling it so that he could suck gently on her lip. 

The feeling of her small, soft face in his hands send a wave of butterflies up a vortex in his stomach. 

Their bodies arched into each other, pressed up against each other with everything they had. 

Aisha ground her hips into him and he gasped, grinding back into her with equal frenzy. She was pulling him down closer to her and he couldn’t crouch anymore, his back sliding down against the wall until he landed on his rear. Despite this, her lips never once left his. 

She nibbled on his lip as she crawled on top of him, and in the midst of their furious kissing, his hands had dragged down, landing right above her ass. 

She jerked her hips up so that his hands _were_ on her ass and he smiled against her mouth. 

“Shut up,” she mumbled, but she was smiling back, and Mark wondered why he’d waited so long to make a move. Why they both waited so long. 

“You’re... so adorable,” he panted, breaking apart from her to tilt her chin up with the tip of his nose and pepper kisses on her throat. “So adorable and beautiful.”

She ground against him again as she pressed her chest into his, looking up into the dark to allow him to nip at her neck. 

He licked at a certain spot that made her moan, and he felt stiffness between his legs, where she was steadily grinding against him. 

His lips on her throat and her hands under his shirt and her moans in the air and his hands on her ass and he has a boner and it’s all just so _delicious_.

She grabbed his hands and guided them to her chest. 

“Touch me back,” she ordered, the desperation evident in her breathlessness. “Anywhere, everywhere.”

She leans in kiss his neck the same way he did to her, her eyelashes tickling his jaw. 

His hands slipped under her shirt as well, traveling up her smooth, soft stomach, up to her breasts. 

They rested atop her bra and between licks at a hickey on his neck, said again. “Please, please _touch me_ Mark.”

Another torrent of butterflies swarmed at in his stomach at the sound of her begging. The thought of her, his ever-stoic, stubborn, hard-headed Aisha melting at his fingertips sent a pulse of pleasure through his body. 

He slipped his hands under the cups of her bra, his thumbs finding her nipples and grazing them slightly. They were so warm in his hands. His body felt like fire on the inside and hers felt like it was on fire on the outside. 

“I wanted this... for so long. Wanted _you_ ,” he panted, and she pulled away after leaving a small love bite atop his collar bone. 

She panted something that sounded like the words “obsessed with you”, leaning cheek against his forehead as he played with her nipples, making her back arch into him. He loved it, loved playing her body like a musician plays the piano. 

She gasped as he ducked his head low, shoving his head under her shirt. 

“M-Mark,” she moaned when his tongue met one of her nipples, lapping, swirling, licking. They didn’t know what they were doing, lost completely in the feeling of each other. 

In what felt like the most unfortunate disturbance that had ever affected them, the door behind Mark’s back suddenly swung open.

The both fell, Mark onto his back, head still up Aisha’s shirt, and Aisha onto him. They both let out a shriek of horror, Aisha jumping off of Mark in a frenzy, and both quickly tried to make themselves look presentable under the blinding light that had just pierced through the darkness.

“Sorry to interrupt,” an amused voice said, and both young adults stared up at the source of it in pure embarrassment, hoping for their eyes to hurry up and adjust to the light. “Mr. Evans called me about a one-way-door predicament. He regretfully was unable to make it in time due to traffic, though I would’ve loved to see his reaction to... this.” 

With a combination of relief and dread, they both realize it wasn’t Mr. Evans that freed them, but Nico. 

He tsked, glancing between both of their blushing faces and disheveled clothes. “Fucking on the job, I see.”

“We were trapped in a cooler, Nico, shut up,” Aisha replied, too nervous to look at Mark. 

“I think ‘trapped’ is a word you use when you both don’t want to be there,” he laughed, and Aisha groaned, hiding her face in her hands. 

Beside himself, Mark couldn’t help but smirk at her reaction. 

_So cute,_ he thought, for what felt like the hundredth time in just the past 20 minutes. 

“How are you here anyway?” Aisha asked, peeking between her fingers to glare up at the ginger. “I thought you were on vacation.”

“Dani and I thought about a surprise visit, but turns out, the surprise was _mutual_!” he chortled, skipping away as Aisha scrambled to her feet, ready to beat him up. 

Mark’s smirk melted into a full on grin when he saw how rumpled her clothes were and the dips and edges of her body that had been flush against his just a few minutes ago. It was all in the dark before and seeing her in the light made his blush deepen in color. 

The sound of his name on her tongue, a pleading whimper, played over and over in his mind. 

He couldn’t wait to hear it again.

As for Aisha, although she threatened Nico not to make the incident a big deal, she knew everything had changed between them. 

They had known, unconsciously, that everything they wanted was so close, they could reach out and touch it. Now they had, and there was not a doubt in sight.


End file.
